Geno Auriemma looks on during UConn’s loss to Notre Dame in the women’s Final Four.

He doesn’t do it a lot. Just twice in the past 148 games.

But now, his team has done it in consecutive years in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament — a place that many teams would be happy to get to. But this is UConn and Auriemma hasn’t gone two years in a row without a title since 2012.

“Sometimes you have to be exposed to this and fail when it’s all on you,” he said after the Huskies’ 91-89 loss in overtime on Friday. “It’s a great learning tool. But I’m a pretty smart guy. I don’t need to learn this (expletive) two years in a row.”

The loss does give him one hollow win: He was right about what he’s been saying all week about it getting harder and harder to win a title as the competition gets better and the struggle to stay on top gets harder. Connecticut junior Katie Lou Samuelson, who had 16 points in the loss, said it’s something you have to learn to expect as soon as you walk into the door in Storrs.

“When you come here you know you have that target on your back, so you can’t complain about it,” she said.

Before the semifinal game, she and her teammates spoke about how they held onto the memory of their loss in the 2017 semifinals to Mississippi State and used it as motivation. Practices, Samuelson said, were stronger this year. Now that feeling will have to stick with them for another year.

“I mean we’re going to use this as motivation,” Samuelson said. “It’s just a different type of loss this year (than in 2017). I felt like we gave ourselves a better chance this year.”

After the loss, Auriemma, who went to his first Final Four before his players were born, wasn’t ready to start looking for what his team had learned from all of this. He’s been doing this for a few decades. And this one — a second consecutive overtime loss in the Final Four when there were so many chances for it to go either way — really seemed to hurt.

“You know, when you do something and it seems like it’s so effortless, you do get numb and forget it’s difficult. It’s very, very difficult,” he said. “There are no bad teams. There’s no bad players. You can’t luck into a national championship. You have to play great.

“You know, one or two players really make the difference at this time of the year. I made this comment before that, when your team gets to the Final Four, it’s not your talent, and it’s not your team that’s going to beat the other team. Generally, when you look back, there’s one or two players that just make unbelievable plays and just dominate the game. And going in, you never know who they’re going to be.”

For Gabby Williams and Kia Nurse though, there will be no chance to use it as motivation on this level. The loss left the seniors without titles in their last two years — again, a rarity only at UConn.

“That’s the unfortunate thing about being a senior in college,” Auriemma said. “Very, very few kids have their senior season end with a national championship, and it’s happened to a lot of kids at Connecticut, but it wasn’t meant to be for these two.”

The Huskies were doomed by a slow start — shooting only 30 percent from the floor in the first quarter — and a stretch of late crucial turnovers. But they kept clawing back — and throughout the game, it seemed like they were only one basket from pulling away until Notre Dame went up by five with less than a minute remaining in overtime and they ran out of miracle shots.

While Samuelson had the best hope for the Huskies’ last miracle with her shot at the buzzer, she doesn’t remember what she was thinking when she heaved it toward the basket.

It doesn’t really matter though. She’ll just use the result as motivation next year.